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Comment by kyriakos | Hacker News Reader

Its not as bad as it first sounds. You can run full office, you have an ok browser and casual games. Its obviously not made for most of the people on HN but it fits the requirements for a lot of people business and home users. Assuming they release some very cheap laptops / convertibles running it it could work.

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I wonder if this year at Build or anytime in the near future we will see a version of Visual Studio distributed via the Windows app store? Seems it will have to get there eventually. I wouldn't mind kicking the tires on Windows S but needing VS would keep me on Pro were a new Windows laptop to be in my future.

Being in the app store requires you go through the file dialog to get permission to read/write/create any files outside the app file, so VS will never work.

Panay also alluded to you being able to upgrade the new Surface Laptop to Windows Pro, if you needed it. They are pushing Win32 apps to go into the store, so app published there that are Win32 will be supported in Windows S.

yeah that sounds like Windows RT but up-gradable if needed. The thing is, for a lot of people just running Office and a browser they'll be happy. What a lot of people won't like is having Edge only as their browser though.

Mozilla and Google are free to add their browsers to store.

Though it's unlikely they'll want to maintain another distribution for Windows while most Windows users are still on Windows 7.

I'm not sure how easily win32 apps can be ported to the store, might be worth the trouble.

As long as your app doesn't do anything too esoteric, it's easy.

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/bridges/deskto...

Note that Google Chrome was previously available with a "Metro app version" during Win 8 but they retired it.

Google will release one if they expect a market share for Windows S. They are offering the browser as a gateway to their services after all.

Yup. Same for the Firefox version. Both can do it, but as long as almost everyone on Windows can support the standard Win32 version and a large number can't use the UWP version, it makes no sense to expend a lot of effort on this.

Mozilla was working on a Metro version of Firefox, too, but canned it due to lack of interest: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2014/03/14/metro/

IIRC browsers in Win 8 "Metro" mode had some exceptions, like they could run non-Metro code in the background. This time around they don't seem to be offering this exception.

But can't be set as the default.

If I can run Linux on it, then maybe.

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